Your Right to Know

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoBarbara J. Perenic | DISPATCHLourdes Barroso de Padilla plays with her 6-year-old daughter, Eva, who is going into the first grade. It is Barroso de Padilla’s goal to create a love of learning in her two daughters.

When Lourdes Barroso de Padilla and her husband enrolled her 6-year-old daughter, Eva, in
Clintonville Academy, she wanted to create opportunities for her that she never had.

“I’ve faced challenges in terms of culturally understanding the college process and saving for
college,” she said. “These things I had to learn along the way with my parents. We understand
education is important for not just getting ahead, but we want to create a love of learning in our
daughters.”

U.S. Latinos were most likely to rank education as an extremely important issue in a recent
study by the Pew Research Center. The study asked Latino voters which issues they considered “
extremely important” to their lives. While 52 percent said the economy and 43 percent said health
care, 57 percent ranked education as “extremely important.”

Just 32 percent said immigration.

“The study opens up the stereotype that Latinos are only concerned with the issue of
immigration,” said Abril Trigo, director of the Center of Latin American Studies at Ohio State
University. “For Latinos — people who are legal citizens — education is important because it looks
to forward the future of our kids. But Latinos are not only migrants, they are people, too, and
have concerns not just about migration.”

Barroso de Padilla said her parents immigrated to the U.S. to escape communist rule in Cuba. Her
father had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education but was business-savvy and owned businesses.
Both of her parents displayed a work ethic, which she uses as a model in her life today.

“What Latinos face as a larger community is that it’s difficult to raise a young person in a
culture that’s not your own,” she said. “If you didn’t grow up here, you have different values and
customs. Education is paramount in order to achieve and get to where you peak, where you want to
go. We have some work to do in our community to have our parents understand the role of education
with cultural and language barriers.”

Even though education is a rising issue, Latinos have the lowest graduation rates in many
Franklin county school districts.

Latino students in Worthington City Schools had a 53 percent graduation rate in 2012, the lowest
in the county.

Columbus City Schools had about a 74 percent graduation rate for Latino students in 2012
compared with 78 percent of black students and 82 percent of white students. West High School had
the second-lowest graduation rate for Latinos in the district at 53 percent, above Columbus Global
Academy at 42 percent.

“For many parents, the American education system is unfamiliar territory, but the community is
aware that you can’t move forward unless education is present,” said Ramona Reyes, the first Latina
member of the Columbus Board of Education.

Reyes said making resources available for parents who are first-generation immigrants is
important so they know what schooling and education options are open for their children. For
example, Columbus City Schools has phone and written communications it sends out in English,
Spanish and Somali.

The Pew study says that education’s rank as a top issue makes sense because 33 percent of the
Latino population in the U.S. is of school age compared with 20 percent of whites.

Ohio’s Hispanic population has increased by more than 30,000 residents in three years, according
to the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, it makes up 3.4 percent of the state’s population, according to
census data released last month, up from 3.1 percent. In Franklin County, the census said the
school-age Hispanic population grew by an estimated 17 percent, while school-age non-Hispanics grew
by no more than 1 percent from 2010 to 2013.

For many first-generation Latino Americans, Trigo said, education is just one hurdle among the
social and economic disparities they face.

“Coming from behind takes a lot of effort, a lot of help,” he said. “It is always
difficult."